Tag: Scenery

Poems about scenery. These poems are a subset of poems about nature, but distinguished by their visual content. They clearly describe the scenery in a more concrete manner.

They have generally come into being when the poet has seen something and felt overwhelmed. Powered by appreciation for nature and its beauty, they almost make you see the scenery yourself. They evoke it in one’s mind.

K-M Skalkenæs is not someone who takes nature for granted. Rather, she chooses to take it in and to see as much as she possibly can. She chooses to soak in it, both for the sake of her health, and out of a genuine desire to understand it.

Whatever comes out of that experience, this is the place you will be able to find it.

Overgrown with weeds, squeezed into place
between apartment blocks –
irregular in shape, a vast expanse of
emptiness and plants –
a little jungle in the middle of the city,
framed by makeshift fences
meant to keep intruders out (the reason’s not extant
since there is nothing there to be intruded on) –
unseen, kept hidden in the shadow of three high-rises
(as if they were put up on purpose
just to keep it secret –
to shield it from potential eyes of tourists
at the station),
untouched except by garbage thrown across the fence,
forgotten and dismissed from life;
a wasteland is the fate
that’s due to real estate left bare
for 15 years without a buyer –
the widow of the slaughterhouse
awaits her second spring
(but that it should occur now seems a doubtful thing)

The grass alights with stripes of green and gold
as sunlight filters through the trees,
and light and shadow divides the ground beneath
in asymmetric patterns – green, gold, green, gold –
of stripes, triangles and an occasional circle,
disappearing and re-appearing with the clouds
which thoughtlessly roll ever on above,
not giving a care to the beauty they periodically
destroy,
green, gold – darkness – green, gold –
darkness. The dualism of tears and joy.

Balancing on a steady stem
the tender purple bluish threads
which make up its small, fragile head
raised to the hiding sun,
its rosy eye gleams to the sky,
that through June ever blinds its eye
to those who seek its warmth,
and waving in the summer breeze
it waits for the sun’s warm release;
it waits for summer’s come

Grey wood, with reddish blotched spots
that spread around the hinges –
withered wood and rusted metal,
bent by gravity and time –
hanging on by habit only,
guarding still the entrance to
an abandoned site where lies
a meadow, grass green-blue

Thin whirling veils of pink and gold
are intertwined across the sky and dance
in slow and graceful motion ‘round
a perfect half-sphere, cold and white and drenched
in mist that makes it wobble slightly to our eyes
as it descends through wisps of pink and gold;
the ribbons killing off its final, fading light,
to let the golden sunlight oversweep the world
—

Oh, whereto do you wind
behind the ribbons of the rosy mist,
the vapour veils that twist in wind
obscuring you, by moisture kissed?

In curls and ringlets, dark
yet vividly expressed like broken brushstrokes
it bends and stretches out
across a piece of sky
that blotched in turquoise, purple, pink and orange
bids the day: “goodbye”;
this oak tree, curled as if asleep already
and yet stretched out too
as if it’s waking, stretching, yawning,
anticipating dawns that shall be coming.